I am a great admirer of Marshall Ganz. His contributions to movements for social justice from the 1960s to the present have been enormous. Having audited his Harvard class on community organizing, I know he is a master teacher. Thus it is with some reluctance that I write to take issue with his recent review of my book The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet). Alas, we have our own disconnect.
Actually, we want the same thing: a politics that is driven by and for the needs of ordinary people, expressed through organizations and representatives beholden to them. Ganz agrees with me that despite the expectations of many, the first decade of mass participation enabled by the Internet hasn’t democratized politics much. But for some reason, Ganz describes my book as myopically blaming only the technology for this failure, leaving out “the people who choose to use the technology in the ways they do.”
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